“Good 1 — Evil 0”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/europe/4501277.stm
Kimberly Morgan, who guestblogged with us a couple of weeks ago, spoke a little while ago on the BBC World Service about the politics of childcare in Western Europe and the United States. It’s a great interview.
Along with colleagues at Bristol I’ve been busy organising opposition to the AUT boycott, drafting motions, collecting signatures and so on. And I’ve been preparing myself mentally for our local association AGM on the 18th of May, since I’ll have to stand up and argue the case against the boycott. There’s bound to be a range of views on the other side: some will be anti-Israel obsessives but I suspect others will be more moderate. The component of the boycott that is going to have the most support is that of Bar-Ilan University, because of its ties to Judaea and Samaria College which is located in a Jewish settlement in the occupied territories. So what has Ariel Sharon done? He’s pushed a decision through the Israeli cabinet (against Labour opposition) “to upgrade this college”:http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/571290.html to full university status! I don’t know enough about Israeli politics to be able to “read” this with any degree of confidence, but it sure looks like a move calculated to undermine moderate opponents of the boycott. Perhaps an AUT that can be represented to Israelis as resolutely anti-semitic (and therefore emblematic of a general European disease) is more useful to Sharon than one which renounces the boycott? David Hirsh at Engage (the anti-boycott blog) “has more”:http://liberoblog.com/2005/05/02/ariel-sharon-asks-the-boycotters-to-dance/ .
Talking of higher education and athletics, I want to recommend to people that they read Leveling the Playing Field. It’s is a terrific book, and a wonderful model of how to do applied normative philosophy. It pursues hard and interesting normative questions in the context of detailed and careful empirical analysis of the situation in higher education. The philosophy guides, but does not get in the way of, the empirical exploration; it is also obvious that the authors are steeped in the empirical evidence and institutional detail of the area they are investigating. In the areas where I know the empirical literature in detail they consistently introduced me to new, and more up-to-date findings than I had to hand.